Magazines of Yesteryear - Computer Shopper Issue 73 - March 1994

This is more like it. Nobody wants a skinny computer magazine. They want great big back breaking telephone directory-style periodicals that not only inform and entertain, but can also be used in self-defence, either to hit someone with or to stop small calibre bullets. This, gentle reader, is the pinnacle of such publications - the one, the only, Computer Shopper (UK). 

It's early 1994 and to all intents and purposes, the 386 is dead, long live the 486! The Pentium is faltering onto the stage albeit at prices that would make your eyes water, while portables are now most definitely mainstream as evidenced by the group test advertised on the front cover, pitting 21 of the mobile(ish) wonders against each other with a starting price of £799. But what else does this fine 600 page(!) issue have in store?

Quite a bit. The notebook test is front and centre but there are also group tests of presentation software and accelerator cards for Windows. Features cover music software, computers and the cops, and Super Computers. Don't get all excited though, the article merely discusses the architectural changes that were on offer and how they might affect future high performance computing. The usual departments are present and correct, as well as the format specific Shopper columns for Mac, Amiga, ST and Archimedes. 

I keep reading the second story as Kenco...

The first news piece reports an autumn release for Chicago. Aka Windows 4 (and eventually Windows 95), this replacement for 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups would see the big M put on its best razzle dazzle to hammer home the point that Windows PC's were for everyone. In other news, Elonex (remember them before they became a purveyor of cheap electronic trash before finally going bust?) were getting into the NeXTStep market with workstations running NeXTStep 3.2. A bold move (with even more bold sales targets of 20,000 machines across Europe in the first twelve months), it's no spoiler to say that it wasn't the success that they thought it would be. Two years later, Apple would buy NeXT to form the basis of what would become Mac OS X.

Speaking of Apple, they were about to launch their eWorld service. A gated community back in the early days of the web, it is the pricing structure that amuses more than anything else. For $8.95 per month, Apple would give you two free hours of use, with each subsequent hour costing $4.95. The very thought of paying by the hour to use the web! The past is a different country and all that...

Finally, there's news that Olivetti will become the sole European distributor of AT&T's EO 440 tablet. Larger than an Apple Newton (and that's saying something), this 10.8 x 7.1 x 0.9 inch device would set you back £1,999 then but at least offered a 7.5 inch mono display and a built in 14.4 modem. 

EO, EO, work on the move with the built-in modem.

To the cover group test and the rise of the truly useful portable PC. They do highlight the Amstrad alternatives (the NC200  being a handy desktop companion, although my preference was always for the NC100 as noted here), and you didn't need to spend megabucks on mobile productivity. In this group, only two machines managed to make it under the all important psychological £1,000 ex VAT barrier - the 386XL-powered Triumph Adler Walkstation 3/25 XL at £799, and the Mitac 4020F at £999. That £200 difference is telling, as the Mitac rocks a 25MHz 486 SX, double the RAM of the TA to 4MB whilst each pack an 85MB hard drive and mono display. Indeed, the Mitac gets the best buy. Other names you might reacll from the period include Watford Electronics with their Aries Perfecta 3300NB, AST's Bravo NB Color, Canon's BN22 BJ notebook with built in printer (those were the days, my friends), and Compaq's Contura 4/25C - still a lovely looking lappy!. 

Handy company info included - and a helpful review layout. 

Hewlett Packard, Olivertti, Panasonic, IBM and Toshiba are other big names here, with big prices to match. Most of these machines include DOS (a couple don't, wanting something like £65 to £99 extra but they'll chuck in a mouse and Windows too), but even the budget TA includes DOS and Win as standard. Only four have 386 processors, the rest coming with a variety of Intel, Cyrix or Texas Instruments 486's. A couple offer 2MB of RAM, the rest provide 4MB, whilst mass storage ranges from 85MB to 200MB, the sole exception being HP's Omnibook 425 which has 10MB of flash storage. And as for colour, well, you'd need a good credit card or deep pockets - the cheapest dual-scan display is the Watford Perfecta's and that machine comes in at £1,500. Active matrix (faster refresh rate, little ghosting and far more vibrant) is epitomised by the Enta NB 6500T for £2,350, and they wanted another £99 for DOS and Windows!

The Shopper columns were always worth a read, and this issue proves no less entertaining. Amiga Shopper looks at Deluxe Music 2.0, coupled with a report on an Amiga party in Topeka Kansas, featuring the team from NewTek. If you remember Babylon 5 or seaQuest DSV, you'll know what their software could do. A Silica advert on the page opposite details the then current Amiga range and just how little you could spend to get an A600 for (if you actually wanted one). £189 for the base machine was really cheap, your bog-standard A1200 was £299 but with many more upgrade options, and the A4000 could be yours for £899, although a more usable configuration would be £999 - and then the monitor on top. You could buy a similarly spec'd Mac LC III for less. That's how competitive Commodore weren't by this point. Oh, and the CD32 was £289. Nice try, Commodore, but the Sony PlayStation would arrive in Japan that December and would easily demonstrate its superior technical chops. 

Atari Shopper talks about the benefits of adding 8MB to an STE (more for use as a Ram disk than anything else), as well as talking about Geneva, a multi-tasking upgrade for Tos, whilst Archimedes Shopper looks at new Archie game Spheres of Chaos and a round up of news. 

The Viglen range - they could have been Contenders... (badum tss!)

It is, however, Macintosh Shopper that is the highlight. MacBiter casts a jaundiced eye over the announcement that Apple would move to the Power PC architecture. To say the author was a tad cynical about Apple's behaviour would be an understatement but he also had a point. No matter how much ill-will you had towards the fruity tinkers in Cupertino, you usually ended up shelling out for their kit anyway. And so it would prove...

Compaq Contura bottom left - a snazzy looking laptop, and the CDS to its right.

As this is Shopper though, it is the adverts that take up most of the page count, as well as providing a handy guide to the state of the DOS/Windows market of the time. 

As noted above, the 486 rules, with only a few hardy box sellers shipping 386 desktops (although 386 laptops are a tad more common). Reeves would happily sell you a 40MHz 386 SX with 2 meg of RAM and a 125MB hard drive for £539 ex. That doesn't include an operating system though. Watford Electronics would do you a similar 2 meg machine with a 170MB hard drive and a software budle for £735 ex. 

Amstrad were still (just) in the market. Time Computer Systems offered a 486SX 25MHz model (4/214MB) for £897 ex VAT, which isn't bad but demonstrates that the once prolific budget box builder was now priced alongside almost every other clone maker out there. Hell, Time were clearing out IBM stock, with a 486 25MHz SX 2/85MB for £699 ex. Alongside IBM were the Ambra range of machines - Ambra being a consumer mail order focused spin off from IBM. Their Sprinta II range was competitively priced too - that ever so familiar 25MHz 486 with a 100MB hard drive for £799. 

They look different, but they are from the same company.

As you can tell, the 386 was your very budget option and very poor value for money considering the benefits of the 486, all the more so when you considered Multimedia! It was the future and there were numerous deals on adding CD-ROM drives. Compaq's Presario CDS625 all-in-one promised a tidy little set up (minus much in the way of expansion options) for £1,375, and it seemed to be that if you were canny enough, a CD-equipped 486 could be yours for just under a grand but really you needed to budget between £1k and 1.5K to get the most balanced set up. 

Toshiba were still masters of the laptop market, featuring prominently with resellers, and even one or two of the latter were offering Macs - LC II's and 475's took care of the lower end of the market for £528 to £849 ex VAT from Novatech, while the more capable Quadra 610 and 650's allowed you to depart with a grand plus of your hard earned cash without a bother.

At this point, Amstrad were way off their game. 

Gateway was plugging its range of machines too - base 486SX 33MHz for £899, Pentium 60 for £1,999 and their non-too shabby looking Handbook 486 for £999. It's a canny looking portable. 

Another dinky little laptop there.

Is that a Lunar Gateway ad? NASA joke for you there, folks. 

Dabs Press were another popular reseller, and tucked away in their listing was the Amstrad Mega PC for £425 - by this point more a curio than a worthy PC/console hybrid. They did, however, offer a decent range of handhelds, and by those I mean Psions and the like. So too did Pico Direct, a retailer who made handhelds their speciality and offered a ton of difference devices. 

Computer Shopper issue 73 shows the DOS/Windows PC at the pinnacle of its 486 journey. There were a growing number of resellers stocking big brands, and there were even more small box builders eager to eke out the thinnest of profit margins, yet it was also the time of decline for the traditional manufacturers too. The likes of Amstrad and IBM were slowly disengaging from the market, becoming just one of many names out there. As for the other computing formats, Atari was wasting away trying to support the Jaguar console and Acorn were making all the right noises but the wider changes to the PC market (multimedia and increasing power at decreasing prices) meant that its glory days were behind it. Apple was looking good, but the approaching launch of Windows 95 and the impression of PC superiority would hurt the company, almost as badly as the cack-handed corporate leadership and the on-going failure to modernise the OS. And as for Commodore, just three months after the publication date of this issue, ol'chicken lips would be bankrupt. 

Against Amstrad, Olivetti's machines had a certain sense of style.

It's always interesting looking at these old magazines. When taken as a whole, they not only inform you of what was happening at the time, but also add flavour to what you learn. Issue 73 was another cracking edition of the then most popular UK computing magazine, but for the next visit to yesteryear, we'll be heading back to the time of the launch of one of my favourite computer formats...

In the meantime, have a great festive/holiday period! I shall be back with more blogging shenanigans in the new year. 

Magazines of Yesteryear - Computer Shopper Issue 80 - October 1994

It's another magazine of yesteryear and this time we're travelling to October 1994 (by issue date, the publication date was early September) and issue 80 Computer Shopper.

The magazine has grown, now coming in at 670 pages, and you have to feel for the posties of the 90's and how their poor backs faired when lugging multiple copies of this around. As for contents, we have a Pentium 90 group test (for a bargain price, but we'll see about that), graphics cards, a decent rage of software being rated, as well as the good old machine reference guide, still in place even if the pickings were increasingly slim for the non-DOS formats. That was to be expected considering Atari had abandoned the computer scene for one last crack of the whip at consoles, and Commodore had imploded earlier in the year. Acorn was still kicking out (the Risc PC (swoon) had arrived in April), and Apple was still Apple - although resellers such as Crown Computer Products Direct were offloading older stock at frankly silly prices - an original Mac LC 2/40 for £199 ex VAT!

Contents - some interesting stuff here.

The format specific list - and check out that circulation figure bottom right - 134k plus! 

In the news was Apple's announcement of licensing its System 7 OS to other hardware manufacturers. This they certainly did, and in my best (imaginary) Morgan Freeman voice, it did not end up being a good idea. Microsoft settled a four year anti-trust investigation (the what if's abound if Gates hadn't folded), Compaq pushes into retail (Dixons, Currys, John Lewis and PC World), and London's underground would soon be getting fifty multimedia information kiosks to supply up to date travel information to travellers. This truly was the future, or so it seemed at the time. 

From the group test, and interestingly, a section at the bottom about the actual company.

Now that's a group test specification table!

The big group test is for Pentium 90-powered machines at a budget price. This, gentle reader, depends on your definition of "budget" - and when it came to the then hot new processor, you started at £1,895 ex VAT and went upwards. These were high spec machines for the time, most coming with 16MB of RAM and a 15 or 17" monitor. Except for Lowland (£2,897 ex) and Dotlink (£2,085 ex), who cheaped out with a 14" screen. Tight basta...

These machines were also supplied with PCI or VLB (VESA Local Bus) graphics cards, and a round up of some of the latest models reveals a) they were varied in pricing - £110 to £599 ex, b) these were serious productivity tools - the 3D graphics cards race was still a while off, and c) they were pretty much maxed out at a resolution of 1,280x1,024, although a couple could handle virtual desktops of up to 2,048x1,536 at 256 colours. The key thing here was that getting a monitor to ably handle such resolutions was probably going to cost you as much, if not more, as the card. Taxan Ergovision monitors were being handled by dealers for around £339 and £669 ex for 15 and 17" varieties respectively. 

Don't be tempted. Not for one minute!

For the format specific stuff, Amiga Shopper is still going, as is Atari Shopper. Jim Nagel hosts the Archimedes Shopper column, while the legendary MacBiter keeps an eye on Macintosh Shopper. His column was one of the main reasons to buy Shopper, and his look at System 7.5 will have you chuckling away even after nearly thirty years. 

Elonex were another decent manufacturer lost to the mists of time.

To the adverts now and this was a time when the PC market was in rude health prior to the consolidation and mass market changes that were to come as the decade progressed. Manufacturers offered machines directly and via dealers, so let's have a look at what you could have bought back in 1994.

Discounted Apples - and no, not worth it either.

First thing you realise is that anything less than a 25MHz 486 SX is dead in the water. Aside from a couple of really cheap laptops (and laptops were coming to the fore even then), there isn't a 386 to be found outside of a Morgan Computers or (in this issue) Crown Direct ad - the latter had a monitor-less Amstrad PC4386 for £299 ex. If you were in the market for a current spec PC, the 486 was your starting point.

The Gateway 2000 opener...

MJN's in return

Gateway 2000's price list compared to...

... MJN's - totally different, obviously.

Naturally, competition was fierce, and this led to some unfortunate coincidences. Take Gateway 2000, once seen as a true competitor to Dell, it leads with a fold out insert featuring Sherlock Holmes. Their ads were often high quality narrative productions, having the machines front and centre of course. Prices aren't too bad either, and a 486 DX2-66 Family PC could be had for £1,299 ex. Pentiums were much more pricey. But what is this? MJN have also gone for a Holmes run (not apologising for that at all), and theirs is laid out in a very "similar" way, albeit with cheaper pricing. Hmmm. Other then-famous names in the market included Elonex, Viglen, Watford Electronics and Byte Direct, the latter of which was eventually purchased by PC World. 

A cracking little laptop, that Contra Aero.

As for laptops, Toshiba and Compaq were the dealer's favourites, although the pair of Olivetti machines looked pretty tasty, and I still love the colour of that Echos model (see below). What is really noticeable is that technology has advanced, and while these machines still have a weight issue (and that's mostly a battery thing), their prices are now, certainly at the lower end of the market, commensurate with their desktop cousins. Check out the Toshiba TC1900S - 486 SX at 25MHz, 4MB RAM, 120MB hard drive, 9.5" screen, internal floppy, DOS 6.22 and weighing under 6.5lbs - all for £829 ex. Now the Viglen Contender desktop - 486 SX at 25MHz, 4MB RAM, 240MB hard drive, DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11, plus a 14" monitor - £799 ex. Admittedly, there were cheaper manufacturers - Time could do the same spec with a Mitac branded machine for £699 - but that's not my point. What had changed was that laptops could now get very close to desktop pricing within the limits of the form factor. Colour screens and faster chips added much more, but on one level, the laptop was getting there. 

Laptop progression - that T1900S is pretty tasty for the price. 

The Viglen Contender range - could have been's...

This was the high point of the Win/DOS combination before the might of Windows 95 changed the perception of the PC for the general consumer. That and putting the Pentium processor front and centre when it came to sales. It also wouldn't be long before 3D graphics cards started to show up. This is about the time in the PC's history that I feel most nostalgic about - and yes, I am aware that nostalgia can tint those glasses in a spectacular way, but PC's at this point were both cool, moderately accessible but also still requiring some technical knowledge to get things to work. Old man shouting at clouds here, but I sometimes do miss playing about with interrupts and HIMEM.SYS.

Anyway, that's two for Shopper, so next time, I'll have a look at a more "scholarly" title. Well, Personal Computer World, but since it described itself as a journal, it's the posh one compared to Shopper. I will leave you with the advert of the Olivetti Echos. Still a looker after all these years...

Magazines of Yesteryear - Computer Shopper Issue 40 - June 1991

The summer of 1991 - what a time to be alive! If you were a kid, you had the joys of listening to "Do The Bartman" and "The Stonk" (Jesus F-ing wept), while adults got all concerned by Color Me Badd singing "I Want To Sex You Up' - truly a more innocent time. Cinema screens were playing the likes of Highlander II (yep, it really was that bad), Misery and the Alan Rickman classic, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. But you're not here for that malarkey. You're here to see what really cool stuff Computer Shopper 40 had in store. Well, like Color Me Badd, they had SX on the brain.

Like the computers of the time, even the magazine is beige.

386SX, but SX nonetheless (much cleaner than any 16/32-bit joke I could think of...), with thirteen of the chunky blighters lined up to demonstrate what super cool technological beasts they were. Being Computer Shopper though meant there was much, much more, with some Smalltalk before getting you SQL-ing. Oh-err missus! Maybe not so innocent a time...

Before we get to the contents, let us first consider the publication itself. It cost a measly 99p, which works out at around £2.15 today - for 400 (count 'em) pages! Okay, it's not all editorial content - this is Shopper after all, and there are adverts a plenty (the first 110 pages almost completely so), but a lot has changed in thirty years. Speaking of which...

Contents page including the oh-so handy format specific list.

1991 was the year the 386 processor really hit the mainstream as the older 286 became pretty much the "budget" processor option and the rise of Windows 3.0 (priced at £80 by some PC manufacturers because not everyone supplied their machines with Windows as standard. Not yet anyway.) demanded a 386 for a truly (then modern) GUI (Graphical User Interface) experience - fans of the Mac, ST, Amiga and Archimedes can rightly laugh until it hurts at this point. Incidentally, those systems were catered for with specific columns for their machines and, in this particular issue, a piece on expanding the Amiga. In a nice touch, there's a reference guide so you can see which articles may relate to your format of choice. 

My, how newsagents have changed...

Starting with the news (page 112 onwards), the first big piece is about Psion's upmarket handheld, the HC. These were a return to speciality market's rather than the consumer one, and they did pretty well as you'd expect from Psion of the time. Amstrad's decision to cease manufacturing of the by then venerable PC1512 and 1640 models, as well as discount the backside of the ill-fated 2000-series meant there were many a bargain available for canny shoppers. Dell offering of a compact 486 raised some eyebrows, as did the price (£2,799 ex VAT), although they had discounted the existing 486-based 425TE from £8,099 to £5,549 ex. so that's alright then... Mannesmann Tally announced cheaper colour printing, with a Thermal Transfer Printer for under £2k!!! I'll have two, thank you, whilst IBM UK were upset at profits warnings after the sales failure of the PS/1 and 2 ranges. Shame. 

Oh, and before I forget, the subscription card is distinctly of its time...

Sandwiched between the news and the notebook group test is a page on Hewlett Packard's latest portable handheld computer, the 95LX. With built in Lotus 1-2-3 and an almost CGA compatible screen, this pint-sized pocket wonder could last for up to 60 hours, which was handy, as by the time you'd bought the device (£449) and the additional extras, (another £350 or so), you'd have precious little cash left for batteries. Still, it was a fantastic little gizmo. 

Good old specification table.

The big group test covers the 386SX portable market, with thirteen machines come under the microscope. Remember Arche? ITS? Ness? Reeves? Nope. Nor should you, as these companies are long gone. Back in '91, they would sell you a variation on the laptop theme with piss-poor ergonomics and shite battery lives, but they were reasonably powerful and they could be moved around without inducing a hernia. Honestly, if you've never lugged an Amstrad PPC, you've never lived! The cheapest rocked up at £1,499, the most expensive at £3,395. Weight for most hovered around the 6-7lbs mark, screens reaching 8 inches in the diagonal and with resolutions set firmly at 640x480. Claimed battery lives were between two and six hours. DOS 3.3 or 4.01 was the standard OS, while some also included Windows - and remember, this is Windows at VGA resolution on an 8 inch passive matrix screen. What a time to have shares in an opticians!

When an 8086 could (just) about see you through the day.

Speaking of which, here is a feature on Virtuality, a British-designed VR system that found brief success both in arcades and on TV (Cyberzone, hosted by Craig Charles - and yes, it's as period as you can guess), before disappearing into the mists of time, leaving only vague recollections and a generation of people with permanent eye strain - more so than the laptop users.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try (and 30 plus years later), keep trying again!

The rest of the mag is a mix of articles and adverts (see the contents page above), so lets see what the latter have to offer. 

1991 was still the time of dealers and resellers, and 'Puters was having a great time flogging Amstrads and Olivettis to one and all. As you can see, the venerable 8086 was still an option, with a single drive mono display model coming in at £365 ex VAT. The "portable" (cough!) PPC ranges were still around, as were clearance PC1640's, although the price on application notice seems more of a warning sign than anything else. Noticeably, an equivalent Olivetti machine, the PCS 86, was about a hundred quid more, and thus the appeal of Alan's kit can be surmised - unless it was the much-maligned 2000 series, whose special offer prices here are rather tasty (and yes, by this point, they had sorted the reliability issues out... mostly). Of course, whether you wanted an 8086 machine in 1991 was a different question - Windows 3 was a thing and 3.1 was just round the corner. Also of note is the price of printers - your basic 9-pin dot matrix item could be had for just over a ton, but if you wanted a laser printer, well, they cost more than the computer you'd be using it with! Base models around £700, but after that, a grand plus was the minimum. 

Don't laugh! In 1991, a 16MHz 286 would see you right. Not sure about the  £2k plus 486 mentioned on the right mind...

Ah, Reeves, selling direct to the customer, and with non too shabby prices either. Your base machine was a 286 running at 12MHz, although that really was the bottom end of the market by then, and if you wanted Super VGA colour graphics (1024x768 tech fans), it could be yours for £799 ex VAT. Being a PC, if you wanted the monitor to actually support that resolution and not bugger your eyes up, that added two hundred quid to the total. 386's in SX flavours could be had for just under a grand, but after that, the sky was the limit. A CD equipped 386SX 20MHz creeps in at £1,699 - and no, I don't see why you'd buy it with a mono monitor either. 

Here's Viglen, who became a prominent manufacturer until purchased by Amstrad much later on in the decade. Their prices weren't too daft, although they really did fancy those tiny desktop cases on the lower end machines. 

Watford Electronics, familiar to many for their general range of computing goodies, were prolific with their Aries range of machines - and again, although the prices are not silly, offering an EGA option in 1991 was stupid, especially when the difference in price between that and VGA was only £50.

I miss the green adverts of Watford Electronics. 

Computers By Post was another dealer, also selling software too, and it's here you'll see a big change compared to the way things are (mostly) done today. Every piece of software cost money back then (unless if was public domain or the introductory shareware version) and prices are... eye-opening. You'd like Word for Windows? £254 please. The latest version of Lotus 1-2-3 (a spreadsheet for those too young to remember)? £298. However, it is their cataloguing of software that really makes me shake my head. There is no way Autoroute (map and direction software) should be in the leisure category. No way at all!!! Still, you had the comfort that none of the packages sold here were those filthy grey imports from overseas...

Local software for local people, there'll be no trouble here!

This was very much a transitional period in the PC world. The older 8086 machines were on their way out as the 286 careened through the sweet spot of affordability (£500-£1,000) before its inevitable demise. A new processor generation, the shiny 386 was about to hold sway, albeit for barely two years, before the 486 stomped itself on the market. Similarly, the alternative formats were slowly fading, as both Atari and Commodore struggled to get their next generation machines to market - the Falcon was a 68030 beast but priced accordingly even as the parent company fizzled back into the console market before carking it, whereas Commodore finally boosted the Amiga with the A1200/A4000 and the AGA chipset, arguably two years too late and anyway, the corporate behaviour of the exec team was going to catch up with the once global behemoth eventually. The Mac, well, Apple were about to pull a Classic (see what I did there?), rehashing eight year old tech into budget machines, although their long term prospects were hampered by the end of the roadmap for the 680x0 processor architecture (which they neatly avoided), and an increasingly stale operating system (which they didn't, at least not until far worse events were to hammer the company). Acorn? Well, they had the new ARM 3 chip, the forthcoming ARM250 (a system on a chip design long before the concept became popular) and would, by some magic of accounting, stay with the computing world until 1998. 

Fin

I leave you then with the final page of Shopper 40. Naturally, this is Zygote and the sublime "Great Moments in Computing" by Croucher and Evans. There has never been a better way to close an issue of any computing magazine. 

Next time: Shopper 80 and October 1994!

Computer Shopper Issue 4 - A blast from the past.

Ah, Computer Shopper, you are still a miss now. It's been two years since you departed the shelves of newsagents after 32 years of service to your readership. Like most UK computer magazines, the pinnacle of your existence was the 1990's, as the consumer PC market took off and manufacturers seemed to be sprouting up almost daily. But it wasn't always like that, so when I picked up a copy of issue 4 from 1988, I had to remember that this was before the period where the magazine became known as that telephone directory-sized behemoth that strained even the strongest of Postie's backs. Let us travel back to the summer of 1988, where the most recent issue of the latest computer mag to hit the UK market would set you back 78p...

Who, in June 1988, could fail to be enticed by such a publication?

Whoa, whoa whoa! 78 pence? Yep, that was pocket money even for me back then, and I vaguely remember having this issue when it first came out. As you can see, it's very much of its time, stapled with all but the most basic of colour restricted to the covers and the first/last couple of pages. Everything else feels like newspaper or a comic of the time. Remember people, we're not in full colour, perfect binding territory just yet... but those days will come...

There's not much colour, but look! PREMIER DISKETTES!!!

At 128 pages excluding the covers and colour sections, it's a decent enough size and feels quite familiar to what Micro Mart (remember that?) remained as until its demise in 2016. As always with magazines, it is what's on the cover that grabs your attention and, if the promise of a preview of the "fastest 286 PC on Earth" doesn't get you going, nothing will... (sarcasm alert, just in case you didn't get the tone...)

I'd buy a PC from him, just so he wouldn't kill me Patrick Bateman-style... 

Having said that, a picture of peak 1980's Michael Dell is a close second, if just for those glasses, but news of Star's latest colour printer, the LC10 (who, as a computer user at the time, did not want one of their colour dot matrix printers???) as well as Dixons' Amstrad basher (for only £399 - we'll get to that in a bit) made this issue an almost mandatory purchase! Apologies, it's easy to take the pittle out of a 34 year old magazine cover, so let's have a look inside, shall we?

And what a contents page it is too!

As you can see from the contents page, there is a lot in here and it's pretty varied. Following on from the news section we have reports on the Atari Show (teasing their PC compatibles that, let's be honest, merely distracted them from the core ST business, and even then, they continued to shoot themselves in the foot for years afterwards), a report from the Einstein Show (now that is a relatively obscure 80's format), before the mag dishes the dirt on the Olivetti PC1 that Dixons thought would be a good competitor to the low-end Amstrads of the time. Not sure about that, what with a lack of built in expandability and frankly silly add-on costs (plus that £399 just gave you single 3.5" drive mono set up and that's before 15% VAT is added for the consumer), but hey, this was a time of interesting machines, rather than generic beige (then black, now LED festooned) boxes.

An introduction to Michael Dell and his company (whatever happened to them?) comes next, with what can only be described as his "serious" expression although I like to call it "constipated." Others might think psychotic, in which case I must axe(!) them to put on "Hip to be Square" by Huey Lewis and the News and chill... To be honest, the idea of fast 286's was a dream back in '88, although the prices were more of a nightmare. The 20MHz 286 of the mono Dell 220 would set you back £2,099 ex VAT, whilst the 310 could give you a 20MHz 386 with colour for £5,099 ex VAT!!! Farking 'ell! This was (and is) serious moolah, and it should be noted that your average DOS user would not benefit much from such power. Those aiming for the new OS/2 would be much better suited to these machines. Of course, what was also new was his sales process - direct to the customer. Another new fangled thing that would never... oh!

There's a handy guide to budget music production, and when I say budget, I mean the software - a decent MIDI keyboard would still set you back £300! There is a piece on "Practical Spreadsheeting" (seriously, there is...), whilst a fan of Locoscript gets to wax lyrical about, well, Locoscript. There are several pages dedicated to Zortech's C++ compiler (for the love of all that is Holy, why???) combined with pages of listings and an explanation of what Object Orientation is.

It's a light read, really...

We then have a question little asked since, ohhh, 1988. Why is there a barrier between business and games software? It's very much a pro-gaming piece and rather quaint, knowing what we know now. What I didn't expect was an online section, with extracts of Bulletin Board conversations. Moving on, there is MacBiter. Ah, MacBiter, possibly the funniest column ever to grace Computer Shopper throughout it's life (until the author passed away, that is). Here, MB tackles the question as to why people like Macs, given issues with over-heating, pricing and the new threat of viruses. Looking at the 2022 M2 MacBook Air line up, two out of three ain't bad - the more things change, the more they stay the same...

The Amiga gets some love with a column that also lasted a good few years until well after Commodore bit the dust, then a single page detailing the membership of the British Association of Computer Clubs in the north, from Lancashire to the Borders. This is followed by a comprehensive list of bulletin boards in the UK - I have no idea how much this must have cost users, I just remember phone calls being expensive and having to ask permission even to make a ten second call to arrange meeting friends. 

There's pages of these listings.

The Star LC10 gets its glory pages (£259 ex VAT thank you kindly) along with the Sidekick Plus review. Public Domain and Leisure Suit Larry get a look in, as does a decent letters section and some classifieds, before it all ends with, as you'd expect if you've ever read any issue of Computer Shopper, Zygote and Croucher & Evans' Great Moments in Computing.

One of the many adverts - I hope you like Amstrads...

I'll be covering a lot of the advertising and pricing in a later post, after I have shown you the jewels of Personal Computer World circa 1990, but I do want to say that there is a fair amount of advertising in here. The resellers pretty much only offer Amstrad PC1512/1640's as a starter, and if you want portables, Amstrad has only slight competition, with much more expensive brands like Epson, Sharp and Toshiba occupying the £1k plus price bracket. And as for software... look at those prices! Lotus 1-2-3 could be had from a reseller for about £235, so the big name packages are bloody expensive. It was also interesting to see an advertiser here that is (in name only) still around today: Morgan Computers. Selling remainder and ex-stock, that company was a go to in the 1990's as their prices were always decent and their variety of stock was second to none. 

Now this ad really does take me back!

Anyway, there we have issue four of Computer Shopper. I have had great fun (yes, I know, I am sad) reading this and I shall be trying to pick up further issues of the magazine as I find them and when they are not stupidly priced. This particular issue is a lovely little time capsule to a time long gone, pre-Windows, pre-Internet, pre-VAT inclusive prices (it helped develop my maths skills, until the buggers raised it to 17.5% in 1991). And yes, there is just a hint of rose in those spectacles. 

Coming up in a couple of weeks, a look at another of the titans of the British computing magazine world: Personal Computer World, this time from 1990.